When the Party’s Over

My drugs of choice these days are coffee and beer—in that order. Somewhat oddly, I didn’t become a daily coffee drinker until I was in my mid-twenties, but—full disclosure—I discovered I enjoyed beer years before I could legally drink it in my home country. In April of 2012, ten years ago, I stopped using the word “party” as verb. It’s a bit embarrassing to write this one, but I hope it will help others who might be struggling with that five-letter word.

Back then I was a gigging musician, who ran an underground music venue with my bandmates. We’d become a staple of the local scene, whether people liked us or not—everyone seemed to know who we were. And yes, I “partied.”

There was this slow, jaded recognition that nothing I was doing was any fun anymore, including music (which I have long loved), socializing (which has always been hard, as a neurodivergent introvert), and even “partying” (which went from something I did because it was fun, to something I had to do to have fun, to something I thought I had to do not to feel lousy). I played lead guitar at a show less than two weeks after I stopped partying, a performance that later aired on the local news station. I played a couple of gigs in bars during those two weeks too—without drinking a drop or much feeling tempted to do so. After two weeks I didn’t feel lousy anymore; in fact, I started to feel really good.

I had discovered (much later than most) the obvious benefits of sleep, water, and food. Those are the secrets to feeling really good. Surprise! Partying means staying up too late, getting up for work in the morning in bad shape, dumping energy drinks, coffee, and nicotine into your system to keep going (I am also an ex-smoker—another tale for another day). Even if you do go to bed on time, if it’s after partying, the sleep isn’t going to be that restful (alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and other substances interfere with sleep). Partying is also hard on your body; being active for more hours means your body uses up a lot of water that doesn’t get replenished (also, if I remember correctly, half an ounce of alcohol, the amount in a 12 ounce can of beer or little glass of wine, takes over a pint of water for your body to process), and the stay-up-late/get-up-early not-much-restful-sleep schedule coupled with chronic dehydration makes you sick. Sick people don’t want to eat, which means going long periods without a meal, and, when you do eat, eating some fat-, sugar-, and salt-loaded slop from a drive-thru window instead of something with some actual nutrition content (partying washes nutrients out of your body, but ironically, I’ve never met a hungover person who craved a salad).

I didn’t lose a bunch of friends or realize the people I partied with “aren’t my real friends”—I’m still friends with some of my old friends a decade later (and others not so much) whether they “partied” or not. You share your time and attention with people; as a committed social behaviorist a la George Herbert Mead, I would argue that a relationship is no more than the product of ongoing interaction. This also means that if you divide your limited time out across more different people, the depth of those relationships will suffer, and the fewer, deeper relationships you do have will suffer. But again, it’s more obvious than that: Relationships wilt when we don’t cultivate them through meaningful interaction, and when I stopped partying, I just didn’t stay out late anymore, so I didn’t see people who did.

To be clear, I still have nothing resembling a “normal” sleep schedule. What wasn’t ruined as a working musician was decisively ruined by graduate school, and so I still stay up until 4am some days and wake up at 4am other days. But I have trouble remembering the last time I went to an event that started later than 8pm. If I’m awake late at night, I want to be at home, reading a book or listening to music or writing or even watching TV. I still drink beer at night sometimes. I drink herbal tea instead at least as often, and I’ve never been to a party where people were passing around the chamomile and hot water to get their buzz on.

You look forward to waking up after a couple months without partying; your brain chemistry and sleep cycle starts to stabilize, and your body gets used to having a healthy and sustainable amount of sleep and water and reasonably nutritious food. Then there’s the matter of what to do with the day, not just to be busy, but to make it meaningful. People need connection; partying, honestly, gives people that connection, albeit in a sometimes shallow, transitory, and disorganized way. Without that connection there’s need for something else. I like solitude; and being alone after all that attention was honestly a big relief. I started taking walks in the woods, hiking, sometimes alone, and sometimes with my wife (we weren’t married yet back then). I’ve always looked to green spaces for something that’s hard to explain (sublime? Transcendent?). Some people find this in a support group, team sport, or hobby; and others find it in a church. I have never been much of an athlete or a team player, found support groups uncomfortable, and tend to turn any hobby into an obsession. As for church, when I was a kid growing up in the Catholic Church, I used to ask to go to the bathroom early in Mass and then go sit in the garden behind the church and listen to the liturgy. So, I started spending more time outside again.

Being outside more meant more exercise. Coupled with better sleep, more water, healthier food, I noticed not only feeling better but thinking better. I was more attentive, better at solving problems, less likely to lapse into stress or panic when things didn’t go as expected. I started reading books again. Lots of books. Reading made me ask new questions and figure out what I didn’t know; it also made my mind slow down and changed the texture and quality of my interactions. I confidently predict that if I had not stopped partying when I did, I never would have gone back to school, let alone earned a PhD and secured a tenure-track professorship.

A whole new lifestyle unfolds around making such a change, and though I have never been a saint, the lifestyle that unfolded around this change has been lasting in many ways. I no longer “party,” and fully abstained from alcohol for almost two years after that decision. When I did drink again, I had two beers and then went home—no tragic relapse or harrowing recovery. I still drink more beer than I probably should, because beer is tasty and awesome (again—not a saint), but overall giving up partying has been one of the best decisions I’ve made.

There is a reason I tell this story, besides getting something personal off my chest or challenging stereotypes. A lot of this comes down to time and how I used it. Since I quit social media back in November, followed more recently with deleting numerous games and apps from my smartphone I have noticed many disturbing parallels to when I quit partying in terms of how my life has changed. I think about what my late academic advisor and friend Ben Agger wrote over a decade ago about how smartphones were changing the ways we interacted with each other, how we perceived time, and even our biological rhythms and cycles. He called it iTime, a blurring of boundaries between private and public, of work and leisure, of day and night. It has, consistent with his theories, unfolded as a constant battle for “eyeballs” or attention which has the effect of “dopamining” society, as philosopher Gerald Moore has recently discussed, in which the machinery of profit-making is turned ultimately on hijacking the reward-mechanisms of the human brain via increasingly sophisticated technological interventions (i.e. “screen culture”).

The patterns of changing biology and interaction I mentioned when I quit partying are eerily similar to some of the things I’ve noticed since I ditched social media, and then screen culture more broadly. I sleep better and wake up more rested because I’m not staying up late and staring at a screen—and all its attendant stimuli—right before bed. Feeling more rested and getting enough sleep tends to coincide with drinking more water, avoiding stimulants like energy drinks and soda (though I still drink coffee most mornings) and eating better (I talked about the connection between body, spirit, and mind via Plato here).

I am less anxious in part because my interactions with others are deeper, slower, and more purposive, built on consideration rather than demanding immediate reaction. Printed books and peer-reviewed articles replace an ephemeral feed of memes and clickbait; when I do watch TV, my attention is on something I want to watch, undivided by the temptation to scroll and game. My interactions are not mediated by the constraints of an online platform, and their value is no longer dictated by likes or shares. I have more time and attention to pursue the things I like and want to do; I am fortunate in that I love my job and look forward to teaching, reading, writing, and publishing in my field. Even the litany of meetings, assessments, paperwork, and other necessary bureaucratic tasks feel strangely Zen. I spend more time outside, genuinely outside, not outdoors but still staring at a screen. The fear of missing out, like the discomfort after I stopped partying, faded after a couple of weeks. I even find time to write music again, as I wrote about here, and in many ways I enjoy it more now than I ever did before.

At the risk of sounding cranky, now that I am finding myself increasingly “on the outside looking in” when it comes to widely-accepted modes of social interaction I am becoming deeply concerned about how these trends are shaping us as a species in the longer term (assuming they are not a transitory fad). On the other hand, I’m not sure where partying ends and chemical addiction begins, any more than I’m sure where online social networking ends and digital addiction begins. I also know this is just one person’s experience, and I may be vulnerable to excess and compulsion, in these domains and in general, in ways that most others are not. For now, the party’s over—in both senses—and I look forward to better things ahead.

Sources:

Agger Ben. 2011. “iTime: Labor and life in a smartphone era.” Time & Society. 20(1):119-136. doi:10.1177/0961463X10380730

Mead, George Herbert. 1968. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Moore, Gerald. 2017. “Dopamining and Disadjustment: Addiction and Digital Capitalism.” In Are We All Addicts Now? Digital Dependence. Edited by Vanessa Bartlett and Henrietta Bowden-Jones. Furtherfield Exhibits, London, and Liverpool University Press.